Python 2.7 introduced some major changes to the unittest library,
adding some extremely useful features. To ensure that every Django
project can benefit from these new features, Django ships with a
copy of unittest2, a copy of the Python 2.7 unittest library,
backported for Python 2.5 compatibility.

To access this library, Django provides the
django.utils.unittest module alias. If you are using Python
2.7, or you have installed unittest2 locally, Django will map the
alias to the installed version of the unittest library. Otherwise,
Django will use its own bundled version of unittest2.

To use this alias, simply use:

fromdjango.utilsimportunittest

wherever you would have historically used:

importunittest

If you want to continue to use the base unittest library, you can –
you just won’t get any of the nice new unittest2 features.

For a given Django application, the test runner looks for unit tests in two
places:

The models.py file. The test runner looks for any subclass of
unittest.TestCase in this module.

A file called tests.py in the application directory – i.e., the
directory that holds models.py. Again, the test runner looks for any
subclass of unittest.TestCase in this module.

When you run your tests, the default behavior of the test
utility is to find all the test cases (that is, subclasses of
unittest.TestCase) in models.py and tests.py, automatically
build a test suite out of those test cases, and run that suite.

There is a second way to define the test suite for a module: if you define a
function called suite() in either models.py or tests.py, the
Django test runner will use that function to construct the test suite for that
module. This follows the suggested organization for unit tests. See the
Python documentation for more details on how to construct a complex test
suite.

Using unittest.TestCase avoids the cost of running each test in a
transaction and flushing the database, but if your tests interact with
the database their behavior will vary based on the order that the test
runner executes them. This can lead to unit tests that pass when run in
isolation but fail when run in a suite.

Once you’ve written tests, run them using the test command of
your project’s manage.py utility:

$ ./manage.py test

By default, this will run every test in every application in
INSTALLED_APPS. If you only want to run tests for a particular
application, add the application name to the command line. For example, if your
INSTALLED_APPS contains 'myproject.polls' and
'myproject.animals', you can run the myproject.animals unit tests alone
with this command:

$ ./manage.py test animals

Note that we used animals, not myproject.animals.

You can be even more specific by naming an individual test case. To
run a single test case in an application (for example, the
AnimalTestCase described in the “Writing unit tests” section), add
the name of the test case to the label on the command line:

$ ./manage.py test animals.AnimalTestCase

And it gets even more granular than that! To run a single test
method inside a test case, add the name of the test method to the
label:

$ ./manage.py test animals.AnimalTestCase.test_animals_can_speak

You can use the same rules if you’re using doctests. Django will use the
test label as a path to the test method or class that you want to run.
If your models.py or tests.py has a function with a doctest, or
class with a class-level doctest, you can invoke that test by appending the
name of the test method or class to the label:

$ ./manage.py test animals.classify

If you want to run the doctest for a specific method in a class, add the
name of the method to the label:

$ ./manage.py test animals.Classifier.run

If you’re using a __test__ dictionary to specify doctests for a
module, Django will use the label as a key in the __test__ dictionary
for defined in models.py and tests.py.

If you press Ctrl-C while the tests are running, the test runner will
wait for the currently running test to complete and then exit gracefully.
During a graceful exit the test runner will output details of any test
failures, report on how many tests were run and how many errors and failures
were encountered, and destroy any test databases as usual. Thus pressing
Ctrl-C can be very useful if you forget to pass the --failfast
option, notice that some tests are unexpectedly failing, and want to get details
on the failures without waiting for the full test run to complete.

If you do not want to wait for the currently running test to finish, you
can press Ctrl-C a second time and the test run will halt immediately,
but not gracefully. No details of the tests run before the interruption will
be reported, and any test databases created by the run will not be destroyed.

Test with warnings enabled

It’s a good idea to run your tests with Python warnings enabled:
python-Wallmanage.pytest. The -Wall flag tells Python to
display deprecation warnings. Django, like many other Python libraries,
uses these warnings to flag when features are going away. It also might
flag areas in your code that aren’t strictly wrong but could benefit
from a better implementation.

Tests that require a database (namely, model tests) will not use your “real”
(production) database. Separate, blank databases are created for the tests.

Regardless of whether the tests pass or fail, the test databases are destroyed
when all the tests have been executed.

By default the test databases get their names by prepending test_
to the value of the NAME settings for the databases
defined in DATABASES. When using the SQLite database engine
the tests will by default use an in-memory database (i.e., the
database will be created in memory, bypassing the filesystem
entirely!). If you want to use a different database name, specify
TEST_NAME in the dictionary for any given database in
DATABASES.

Aside from using a separate database, the test runner will otherwise
use all of the same database settings you have in your settings file:
ENGINE, USER, HOST, etc. The
test database is created by the user specified by USER, so you’ll
need to make sure that the given user account has sufficient privileges to
create a new database on the system.

For fine-grained control over the character encoding of your test
database, use the TEST_CHARSET option. If you’re using
MySQL, you can also use the TEST_COLLATION option to
control the particular collation used by the test database. See the
settings documentation for details of these
advanced settings.

Finding data from your production database when running tests?

If your code attempts to access the database when its modules are compiled,
this will occur before the test database is set up, with potentially
unexpected results. For example, if you have a database query in
module-level code and a real database exists, production data could pollute
your tests. It is a bad idea to have such import-time database queries in
your code anyway - rewrite your code so that it doesn’t do this.

Then any other tests (e.g. doctests) that may alter the database without
restoring it to its original state are run.

Changed in Django 1.5: Before Django 1.5, the only guarantee was that
TestCase tests were always ran first, before any other
tests.

Note

The new ordering of tests may reveal unexpected dependencies on test case
ordering. This is the case with doctests that relied on state left in the
database by a given TransactionTestCase test, they
must be updated to be able to run independently.

Regardless of the value of the DEBUG setting in your configuration
file, all Django tests run with DEBUG=False. This is to ensure that
the observed output of your code matches what will be seen in a production
setting.

Caches are not cleared after each test, and running “manage.py test fooapp” can
insert data from the tests into the cache of a live system if you run your
tests in production because, unlike databases, a separate “test cache” is not
used. This behavior may change in the future.

A full explanation of this error output is beyond the scope of this document,
but it’s pretty intuitive. You can consult the documentation of Python’s
unittest library for details.

Note that the return code for the test-runner script is 1 for any number of
failed and erroneous tests. If all the tests pass, the return code is 0. This
feature is useful if you’re using the test-runner script in a shell script and
need to test for success or failure at that level.

In recent versions of Django, the default password hasher is rather slow by
design. If during your tests you are authenticating many users, you may want
to use a custom settings file and set the PASSWORD_HASHERS setting
to a faster hashing algorithm:

PASSWORD_HASHERS=('django.contrib.auth.hashers.MD5PasswordHasher',)

Don’t forget to also include in PASSWORD_HASHERS any hashing
algorithm used in fixtures, if any.

The test client is a Python class that acts as a dummy Web browser, allowing
you to test your views and interact with your Django-powered application
programmatically.

Some of the things you can do with the test client are:

Simulate GET and POST requests on a URL and observe the response –
everything from low-level HTTP (result headers and status codes) to
page content.

See the chain of redirects (if any) and check the URL and status code at
each step.

Test that a given request is rendered by a given Django template, with
a template context that contains certain values.

Note that the test client is not intended to be a replacement for Selenium or
other “in-browser” frameworks. Django’s test client has a different focus. In
short:

Use Django’s test client to establish that the correct template is being
rendered and that the template is passed the correct context data.

Use in-browser frameworks like Selenium to test rendered HTML and the
behavior of Web pages, namely JavaScript functionality. Django also
provides special support for those frameworks; see the section on
LiveServerTestCase for more details.

A comprehensive test suite should use a combination of both test types.

As this example suggests, you can instantiate Client from within a session
of the Python interactive interpreter.

Note a few important things about how the test client works:

The test client does not require the Web server to be running. In fact,
it will run just fine with no Web server running at all! That’s because
it avoids the overhead of HTTP and deals directly with the Django
framework. This helps make the unit tests run quickly.

When retrieving pages, remember to specify the path of the URL, not the
whole domain. For example, this is correct:

>>> c.get('/login/')

This is incorrect:

>>> c.get('http://www.example.com/login/')

The test client is not capable of retrieving Web pages that are not
powered by your Django project. If you need to retrieve other Web pages,
use a Python standard library module such as urllib or
urllib2.

Although the above example would work in the Python interactive
interpreter, some of the test client’s functionality, notably the
template-related functionality, is only available while tests are
running.

The reason for this is that Django’s test runner performs a bit of black
magic in order to determine which template was loaded by a given view.
This black magic (essentially a patching of Django’s template system in
memory) only happens during test running.

By default, the test client will disable any CSRF checks
performed by your site.

If, for some reason, you want the test client to perform CSRF
checks, you can create an instance of the test client that
enforces CSRF checks. To do this, pass in the
enforce_csrf_checks argument when you construct your
client:

Makes a POST request on the provided path and returns a
Response object, which is documented below.

The key-value pairs in the data dictionary are used to submit POST
data. For example:

>>> c=Client()>>> c.post('/login/',{'name':'fred','passwd':'secret'})

...will result in the evaluation of a POST request to this URL:

/login/

...with this POST data:

name=fred&passwd=secret

If you provide content_type (e.g. text/xml for an XML
payload), the contents of data will be sent as-is in the POST
request, using content_type in the HTTP Content-Type header.

If you don’t provide a value for content_type, the values in
data will be transmitted with a content type of
multipart/form-data. In this case, the key-value pairs in
data will be encoded as a multipart message and used to create the
POST data payload.

To submit multiple values for a given key – for example, to specify
the selections for a <selectmultiple> – provide the values as a
list or tuple for the required key. For example, this value of data
would submit three selected values for the field named choices:

{'choices':('a','b','d')}

Submitting files is a special case. To POST a file, you need only
provide the file field name as a key, and a file handle to the file you
wish to upload as a value. For example:

(The name attachment here is not relevant; use whatever name your
file-processing code expects.)

Note that if you wish to use the same file handle for multiple
post() calls then you will need to manually reset the file
pointer between posts. The easiest way to do this is to
manually close the file after it has been provided to
post(), as demonstrated above.

You should also ensure that the file is opened in a way that
allows the data to be read. If your file contains binary data
such as an image, this means you will need to open the file in
rb (read binary) mode.

If your site uses Django’s authentication system
and you deal with logging in users, you can use the test client’s
login() method to simulate the effect of a user logging into the
site.

After you call this method, the test client will have all the cookies
and session data required to pass any login-based tests that may form
part of a view.

The format of the credentials argument depends on which
authentication backend you’re using
(which is configured by your AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS
setting). If you’re using the standard authentication backend provided
by Django (ModelBackend), credentials should be the user’s
username and password, provided as keyword arguments:

>>> c=Client()>>> c.login(username='fred',password='secret')# Now you can access a view that's only available to logged-in users.

If you’re using a different authentication backend, this method may
require different credentials. It requires whichever credentials are
required by your backend’s authenticate() method.

login() returns True if it the credentials were accepted and
login was successful.

Finally, you’ll need to remember to create user accounts before you can
use this method. As we explained above, the test runner is executed
using a test database, which contains no users by default. As a result,
user accounts that are valid on your production site will not work
under test conditions. You’ll need to create users as part of the test
suite – either manually (using the Django model API) or with a test
fixture. Remember that if you want your test user to have a password,
you can’t set the user’s password by setting the password attribute
directly – you must use the
set_password() function to
store a correctly hashed password. Alternatively, you can use the
create_user() helper
method to create a new user with a correctly hashed password.

The get() and post() methods both return a Response object. This
Response object is not the same as the HttpResponse object returned
Django views; the test response object has some additional data useful for
test code to verify.

A list of Template instances used to render the final content, in
the order they were rendered. For each template in the list, use
template.name to get the template’s file name, if the template was
loaded from a file. (The name is a string such as
'admin/index.html'.)

You can also use dictionary syntax on the response object to query the value
of any settings in the HTTP headers. For example, you could determine the
content type of a response using response['Content-Type'].

If you point the test client at a view that raises an exception, that exception
will be visible in the test case. You can then use a standard try...except
block or assertRaises() to test for exceptions.

The only exceptions that are not visible to the test client are Http404,
PermissionDenied and SystemExit. Django catches these exceptions
internally and converts them into the appropriate HTTP response codes. In these
cases, you can check response.status_code in your test.

fromdjango.utilsimportunittestfromdjango.test.clientimportClientclassSimpleTest(unittest.TestCase):defsetUp(self):# Every test needs a client.self.client=Client()deftest_details(self):# Issue a GET request.response=self.client.get('/customer/details/')# Check that the response is 200 OK.self.assertEqual(response.status_code,200)# Check that the rendered context contains 5 customers.self.assertEqual(len(response.context['customers']),5)

Django TestCase classes make use of database transaction facilities, if
available, to speed up the process of resetting the database to a known state
at the beginning of each test. A consequence of this, however, is that the
effects of transaction commit and rollback cannot be tested by a Django
TestCase class. If your test requires testing of such transactional
behavior, you should use a Django TransactionTestCase.

TransactionTestCase and TestCase are identical except for the manner
in which the database is reset to a known state and the ability for test code
to test the effects of commit and rollback:

A TransactionTestCase resets the database after the test runs by
truncating all tables. A TransactionTestCase may call commit and rollback
and observe the effects of these calls on the database.

A TestCase, on the other hand, does not truncate tables after a test.
Instead, it encloses the test code in a database transaction that is rolled
back at the end of the test. Both explicit commits like
transaction.commit() and implicit ones that may be caused by
Model.save() are replaced with a nop operation. This guarantees that
the rollback at the end of the test restores the database to its initial
state.

When running on a database that does not support rollback (e.g. MySQL with the
MyISAM storage engine), TestCase falls back to initializing the database
by truncating tables and reloading initial data.

Warning

While commit and rollback operations still appear to work when
used in TestCase, no actual commit or rollback will be performed by the
database. This can cause your tests to pass or fail unexpectedly. Always
use TransactionalTestCase when testing transactional behavior.

Note

Changed in Django 1.5.

Prior to 1.5, TransactionTestCase flushed the database tables before
each test. In Django 1.5, this is instead done after the test has been run.

When the flush took place before the test, it was guaranteed that primary
key values started at one in TransactionTestCase
tests.

Tests should not depend on this behaviour, but for legacy tests that do, the
reset_sequences attribute can be used until
the test has been properly updated.

Setting reset_sequences=True on a TransactionTestCase will make
sure sequences are always reset before the test run:

classTestsThatDependsOnPrimaryKeySequences(TransactionTestCase):reset_sequences=Truedeftest_animal_pk(self):lion=Animal.objects.create(name="lion",sound="roar")# lion.pk is guaranteed to always be 1self.assertEqual(lion.pk,1)

Unless you are explicitly testing primary keys sequence numbers, it is
recommended that you do not hard code primary key values in tests.

Using reset_sequences=True will slow down the test, since the primary
key reset is an relatively expensive database operation.

This class provides some additional capabilities that can be useful for testing
Web sites.

Converting a normal unittest.TestCase to a Django TestCase is
easy: Just change the base class of your test from 'unittest.TestCase' to
'django.test.TestCase'. All of the standard Python unit test functionality
will continue to be available, but it will be augmented with some useful
additions, including:

Automatic loading of fixtures.

Wraps each test in a transaction.

Creates a TestClient instance.

Django-specific assertions for testing for things like redirection and form
errors.

LiveServerTestCase does basically the same as
TransactionTestCase with one extra feature: it launches a
live Django server in the background on setup, and shuts it down on teardown.
This allows the use of automated test clients other than the
Django dummy client such as, for example, the Selenium
client, to execute a series of functional tests inside a browser and simulate a
real user’s actions.

By default the live server’s address is 'localhost:8081' and the full URL
can be accessed during the tests with self.live_server_url. If you’d like
to change the default address (in the case, for example, where the 8081 port is
already taken) then you may pass a different one to the test command
via the --liveserver option, for example:

./manage.py test --liveserver=localhost:8082

Another way of changing the default server address is by setting the
DJANGO_LIVE_TEST_SERVER_ADDRESS environment variable somewhere in your
code (for example, in a custom test runner):

In the case where the tests are run by multiple processes in parallel (for
example, in the context of several simultaneous continuous integration
builds), the processes will compete for the same address, and therefore your
tests might randomly fail with an “Address already in use” error. To avoid this
problem, you can pass a comma-separated list of ports or ranges of ports (at
least as many as the number of potential parallel processes). For example:

./manage.py test --liveserver=localhost:8082,8090-8100,9000-9200,7041

Then, during test execution, each new live test server will try every specified
port until it finds one that is free and takes it.

To demonstrate how to use LiveServerTestCase, let’s write a simple Selenium
test. First of all, you need to install the selenium package into your
Python path:

pip install selenium

Then, add a LiveServerTestCase-based test to your app’s tests module
(for example: myapp/tests.py). The code for this test may look as follows:

This example will automatically open Firefox then go to the login page, enter
the credentials and press the “Log in” button. Selenium offers other drivers in
case you do not have Firefox installed or wish to use another browser. The
example above is just a tiny fraction of what the Selenium client can do; check
out the full reference for more details.

When using an in-memory SQLite database to run the tests, the same database
connection will be shared by two threads in parallel: the thread in which
the live server is run and the thread in which the test case is run. It’s
important to prevent simultaneous database queries via this shared
connection by the two threads, as that may sometimes randomly cause the
tests to fail. So you need to ensure that the two threads don’t access the
database at the same time. In particular, this means that in some cases
(for example, just after clicking a link or submitting a form), you might
need to check that a response is received by Selenium and that the next
page is loaded before proceeding with further test execution.
Do this, for example, by making Selenium wait until the <body> HTML tag
is found in the response (requires Selenium > 2.13):

deftest_login(self):fromselenium.webdriver.support.waitimportWebDriverWaittimeout=2...self.selenium.find_element_by_xpath('//input[@value="Log in"]').click()# Wait until the response is receivedWebDriverWait(self.selenium,timeout).until(lambdadriver:driver.find_element_by_tag_name('body'))

The tricky thing here is that there’s really no such thing as a “page load,”
especially in modern Web apps that generate HTML dynamically after the
server generates the initial document. So, simply checking for the presence
of <body> in the response might not necessarily be appropriate for all
use cases. Please refer to the Selenium FAQ and
Selenium documentation for more information.

Every test case in a django.test.TestCase instance has access to an
instance of a Django test client. This client can be accessed as
self.client. This client is recreated for each test, so you don’t have to
worry about state (such as cookies) carrying over from one test to another.

A test case for a database-backed Web site isn’t much use if there isn’t any
data in the database. To make it easy to put test data into the database,
Django’s custom TestCase class provides a way of loading fixtures.

A fixture is a collection of data that Django knows how to import into a
database. For example, if your site has user accounts, you might set up a
fixture of fake user accounts in order to populate your database during tests.

The most straightforward way of creating a fixture is to use the
manage.pydumpdata command. This assumes you
already have some data in your database. See the dumpdatadocumentation for more details.

Note

If you’ve ever run manage.pysyncdb, you’ve
already used a fixture without even knowing it! When you call
syncdb in the database for the first time, Django
installs a fixture called initial_data. This gives you a way
of populating a new database with any initial data, such as a
default set of categories.

Fixtures with other names can always be installed manually using
the manage.pyloaddata command.

Initial SQL data and testing

Django provides a second way to insert initial data into models –
the custom SQL hook. However, this technique
cannot be used to provide initial data for testing purposes.
Django’s test framework flushes the contents of the test database
after each test; as a result, any data added using the custom SQL
hook will be lost.

Once you’ve created a fixture and placed it in a fixtures directory in one
of your INSTALLED_APPS, you can use it in your unit tests by
specifying a fixtures class attribute on your django.test.TestCase
subclass:

fromdjango.testimportTestCasefrommyapp.modelsimportAnimalclassAnimalTestCase(TestCase):fixtures=['mammals.json','birds']defsetUp(self):# Test definitions as before.call_setup_methods()deftestFluffyAnimals(self):# A test that uses the fixtures.call_some_test_code()

Here’s specifically what will happen:

At the start of each test case, before setUp() is run, Django will
flush the database, returning the database to the state it was in
directly after syncdb was called.

Then, all the named fixtures are installed. In this example, Django will
install any JSON fixture named mammals, followed by any fixture named
birds. See the loaddata documentation for more
details on defining and installing fixtures.

This flush/load procedure is repeated for each test in the test case, so you
can be certain that the outcome of a test will not be affected by another test,
or by the order of test execution.

By default, fixtures are only loaded into the default database. If you are
using multiple databases and set multi_db=True, fixtures will be loaded into all databases.

If your application provides views, you may want to include tests that use the
test client to exercise those views. However, an end user is free to deploy the
views in your application at any URL of their choosing. This means that your
tests can’t rely upon the fact that your views will be available at a
particular URL.

In order to provide a reliable URL space for your test,
django.test.TestCase provides the ability to customize the URLconf
configuration for the duration of the execution of a test suite. If your
TestCase instance defines an urls attribute, the TestCase will use
the value of that attribute as the ROOT_URLCONF for the duration
of that test.

Django sets up a test database corresponding to every database that is
defined in the DATABASES definition in your settings
file. However, a big part of the time taken to run a Django TestCase
is consumed by the call to flush that ensures that you have a
clean database at the start of each test run. If you have multiple
databases, multiple flushes are required (one for each database),
which can be a time consuming activity – especially if your tests
don’t need to test multi-database activity.

As an optimization, Django only flushes the default database at
the start of each test run. If your setup contains multiple databases,
and you have a test that requires every database to be clean, you can
use the multi_db attribute on the test suite to request a full
flush.

This test case will flush all the test databases before running
testIndexPageView.

The multi_db flag also affects into which databases the
attr:TransactionTestCase.fixtures are loaded. By default (when
multi_db=False), fixtures are only loaded into the default database.
If multi_db=True, fixtures are loaded into all databases.

For testing purposes it’s often useful to change a setting temporarily and
revert to the original value after running the testing code. For this use case
Django provides a standard Python context manager (see PEP 343)
settings(), which can be used like this:

fromdjango.testimportTestCaseclassLoginTestCase(TestCase):deftest_login(self):# First check for the default behaviorresponse=self.client.get('/sekrit/')self.assertRedirects(response,'/accounts/login/?next=/sekrit/')# Then override the LOGIN_URL settingwithself.settings(LOGIN_URL='/other/login/'):response=self.client.get('/sekrit/')self.assertRedirects(response,'/other/login/?next=/sekrit/')

This example will override the LOGIN_URL setting for the code
in the with block and reset its value to the previous state afterwards.

When given a class, the decorator modifies the class directly and
returns it; it doesn’t create and return a modified copy of it. So if
you try to tweak the above example to assign the return value to a
different name than LoginTestCase, you may be surprised to find that
the original LoginTestCase is still equally affected by the
decorator.

When overriding settings, make sure to handle the cases in which your app’s
code uses a cache or similar feature that retains state even if the
setting is changed. Django provides the
django.test.signals.setting_changed signal that lets you register
callbacks to clean up and otherwise reset state when settings are changed.

The failure messages given by most of these assertion methods can be customized
with the msg_prefix argument. This string will be prefixed to any failure
message generated by the assertion. This allows you to provide additional
details that may help you to identify the location and cause of an failure in
your test suite.

Asserts that execution of callable callable_obj raised the
expected_exception exception and that such exception has an
expected_message representation. Any other outcome is reported as a
failure. Similar to unittest’s assertRaisesRegexp()
with the difference that expected_message isn’t a regular expression.

Asserts that a Response instance produced the given status_code and
that text appears in the content of the response. If count is
provided, text must occur exactly count times in the response.

New in Django 1.4.

Set html to True to handle text as HTML. The comparison with
the response content will be based on HTML semantics instead of
character-by-character equality. Whitespace is ignored in most cases,
attribute ordering is not significant. See
assertHTMLEqual() for more details.

Asserts that a Response instance produced the given status_code and
that text does not appears in the content of the response.

New in Django 1.4.

Set html to True to handle text as HTML. The comparison with
the response content will be based on HTML semantics instead of
character-by-character equality. Whitespace is ignored in most cases,
attribute ordering is not significant. See
assertHTMLEqual() for more details.

Asserts that a queryset qs returns a particular list of values values.

The comparison of the contents of qs and values is performed using
the function transform; by default, this means that the repr() of
each value is compared. Any other callable can be used if repr() doesn’t
provide a unique or helpful comparison.

By default, the comparison is also ordering dependent. If qs doesn’t
provide an implicit ordering, you can set the ordered parameter to
False, which turns the comparison into a Python set comparison.

Changed in Django 1.4: The ordered parameter is new in version 1.4. In earlier versions,
you would need to ensure the queryset is ordered consistently, possibly
via an explicit order_by() call on the queryset prior to
comparison.

Asserts that when func is called with *args and **kwargs that
num database queries are executed.

If a "using" key is present in kwargs it is used as the database
alias for which to check the number of queries. If you wish to call a
function with a using parameter you can do it by wrapping the call with
a lambda to add an extra parameter:

Asserts that the strings xml1 and xml2 are equal. The
comparison is based on XML semantics. Similarily to
assertHTMLEqual(), the comparison is
made on parsed content, hence only semantic differences are considered, not
syntax differences. When unvalid XML is passed in any parameter, an
AssertionError is always raised, even if both string are identical.

If any of your Django views send email using Django’s email
functionality, you probably don’t want to send email each time
you run a test using that view. For this reason, Django’s test runner
automatically redirects all Django-sent email to a dummy outbox. This lets you
test every aspect of sending email – from the number of messages sent to the
contents of each message – without actually sending the messages.

The test runner accomplishes this by transparently replacing the normal
email backend with a testing backend.
(Don’t worry – this has no effect on any other email senders outside of
Django, such as your machine’s mail server, if you’re running one.)

During test running, each outgoing email is saved in
django.core.mail.outbox. This is a simple list of all
EmailMessage instances that have been sent.
The outbox attribute is a special attribute that is created only when
the locmem email backend is used. It doesn’t normally exist as part of the
django.core.mail module and you can’t import it directly. The code
below shows how to access this attribute correctly.

Here’s an example test that examines django.core.mail.outbox for length
and contents:

fromdjango.coreimportmailfromdjango.testimportTestCaseclassEmailTest(TestCase):deftest_send_email(self):# Send message.mail.send_mail('Subject here','Here is the message.','from@example.com',['to@example.com'],fail_silently=False)# Test that one message has been sent.self.assertEqual(len(mail.outbox),1)# Verify that the subject of the first message is correct.self.assertEqual(mail.outbox[0].subject,'Subject here')

As noted previously, the test outbox is emptied
at the start of every test in a Django TestCase. To empty the outbox
manually, assign the empty list to mail.outbox:

The unittest library provides the @skipIf and
@skipUnless decorators to allow you to skip tests
if you know ahead of time that those tests are going to fail under certain
conditions.

For example, if your test requires a particular optional library in order to
succeed, you could decorate the test case with @skipIf. Then, the test runner will report that the test wasn’t
executed and why, instead of failing the test or omitting the test altogether.

To supplement these test skipping behaviors, Django provides two
additional skip decorators. Instead of testing a generic boolean,
these decorators check the capabilities of the database, and skip the
test if the database doesn’t support a specific named feature.

The decorators use a string identifier to describe database features.
This string corresponds to attributes of the database connection
features class. See django.db.backends.BaseDatabaseFeatures
class for a full list of database features that can be used as a basis
for skipping tests.